Unlike almost everything else, the price of new home-entertainment gear moves only one way — down. While $99 DVD recorders bulk-stacked at the Quik-Mart are still a few years away, DVD recorders have already come down to match what a high-end VCR used to cost. Witness Pioneer's new DVR-320 and DVR-520H, with list prices of just $399 and $599, respectively. These slim, largely identical components record on write-once DVD-R and erasable DVD-RW discs.
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Why the $200 difference? The DVR-520H has an extraordinarily quiet 80-gigabyte (GB) hard-disk drive so you can record TV programs either to that or DVD. You can also dub from the hard drive to DVD, meaning you could accumulate a week's worth of, say, All My Children, edit out the commercials, and then burn the whole sobbin' match to a DVD at high speed.
Four recording modes for both DVD and hard-drive dubbing — Fine, SP, LP, and EP — offer different tradeoffs between recording time and picture quality. On the hard drive, you can record up to 17 hours in Fine mode or up to 102 hours in EP mode. On DVD, you get from 1 to 6 hours. Both machines also provide a manual recording mode that lets you fine-tune the recording-time/picture-quality tradeoff in 32 individual levels, with EP equivalent to level 1 and Fine to level 32.
PDF: Playback Compatibility Table
The 520H has a Disc Backup mode in which it copies a DVD bit for bit at high speed so you can save your edited home movies to the hard drive and make as many perfect copies as you like. Of course, as with any consumer DVD recorder, you can't dub copy-protected discs, which in cludes almost all commercial DVD movies.
Aside from their record buttons and front-panel A/V inputs concealed behind drop-down doors — including FireWire (i.Link) ports for dubbing to or from a DV camcorder or computer — the Pioneer recorders look like standard DVD players. Both rear panels (only the 520H is shown on page 48) look like most mid-level DVD players, but they have antenna/cable inputs for their built-in standard-definition TV tuners, two more A/V inputs for recording from external sources (like a satellite tuner), and dual A/V outputs so you can make a loop-through connection with a cable box or VCR.
Given that the two Pioneer recorders are effectively identical aside from the hard drive in the DVR-520H, I used that model for most of my evaluation. Even the remote controls are almost identical, with only a few extra buttons on the 520H remote (shown). The DVR-320 looked, sounded, and behaved precisely the same as far as DVD recording and playback.
SETUP Wiring up the recorder was straightforward. I ran my cable feed to its antenna/cable input and used a set of A/V ins/outs for my Comcast digital cable box. The component-video and optical digital audio outputs went to my preamp/processor, from which they fed my amplifiers, speakers, and HDTV monitor.
DVD PLAYBACK The DVR-520H proved to be an excellent DVD player. The garish, color-boosted images of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 looked suitably cartoonish and “popping.” In A/B comparisons using dual copies of other DVD movies, its picture occasionally looked a tiny bit softer than the one from my reference player (a much more expensive model), but that was the only difference. If you buy one of these decks to be your main DVD player as well as recorder, you won't be short-changing yourself.
Playback commands were executed briskly, onscreen displays were clear, and the compact remote, though a bit crowded with all those recording and editing keys, is simple and usable. I especially liked the Skip and Back keys. Skip jumps forward by 30 seconds or 1, 2, 5, or 10 minutes, and Back jumps by 5, 15, or 30 seconds or 1, 2, or 3 minutes, both depending on how many times you press the key. Very handy!
TV RECORDING/WATCHING It's simple to record TV shows from the onboard analog tuner to either DVD or the hard drive. A Home Menu key brings up a colorful and well-organized screen including every primary function: Timer Recording, Copy, Disc Setup (for DVD initializing, naming, finalizing, and so on), playback and recording options, and more.
I made test recordings of ABC's World News Tonight in each mode on subsequent nights — network anchor-desk cameras deliver about as clean a standard-def signal as you'll get — by simply keying in the VCR Plus+ codes from my local newspaper on the Timer Recording screen. I was prompted to select a recording mode and whether I wanted to record the show once, daily, or weekly. You can also schedule recordings by entering times and channels.
The Skip and Back buttons work the same with either the hard drive or a DVD-RW (in VR mode) for programs you've recorded or are currently recording. Unfortunately, the DVR-520H doesn't automatically buffer to the hard drive a chunk of whatever live programming you tune it to. That means you can't pause or skip/scan ahead or back with live TV — TiVo-like features Pioneer calls Chase Play — without specifically starting a recording. You have to press the record key, and then use Pioneer's nifty Disc Navigator screen to control playback.
The downside? The DVR-520H will go on recording until you stop it or it runs out of space on the hard drive or loaded DVD, which makes it more cumbersome to use than a TiVo, ReplayTV, cable, or satellite hard-disk video recorder.
RECORDING QUALITY The Fine mode on both decks produced results that were close to indistinguishable from the originals, and SP recordings looked almost as good. The SP, LP, and EP recording modes are analogous to the VHS modes with the same names, but the results are way better except for maybe action scenes in EP. In essence, the longer the recording time (and the lower the bit-rate), the more encoding artifacts, or picture problems, you'll see.
The LP recording appeared noticeably softer, with visible “wateriness” (what I call this sort of block distortion) on fast-motion shots. EP delivered about the same look on the essentially motionless anchor-desk segments, with a little more noise or graininess, but fast-motion shots had obvious blocking, with areas of the picture breaking up into little square patches.
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I recorded the first episode of ABC's new series Lost in Fine mode. Watching the result was essentially the same as viewing the show live except I could pause, skip, and scan at will.
DVD COPYING/EDITING Dubbing programs from the 520H's hard drive to a DVD-R/RW was especially easy thanks to the One Touch Copy feature. Load in a recordable DVD and hit the One Touch Copy key while watching any program recorded on the hard drive, and the 520H will burn it to DVD at the highest possible speed while you continue watching. Pretty cool.
Copy speeds depend in part on the original recording mode. For example, dubbing SP recordings proceeded at about 4 x speed even on my 2 x -rated Fuji DVD-RW blanks — apparently the recorder determines the maximum rate on its own. Pioneer says both recorders can use up to 8 x blank discs (I had none on hand), which should cut copy times in half again. There's also a manual copy mode for dubbing from the hard drive to a DVD (or vice versa) — this lets you set up chapters and headings, titles, recording order, and recording mode(s) for multiple recordings ahead of time. And you can pick a lower-quality recording mode for dubbing to DVD to fit more on a disc, but only at normal (1 x ) speed.
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The 520H provides a useful array of editing functions for all recorded programs, whether on DVD-RW or the hard drive (and the 320 has the same for DVD-RW). You access these via the Disc Navigator screen, which provides a list of functions on the left and small thumbnails of recorded chapters or sections on the rest of the screen. It's a very well-designed system. Especially cool is that when you select a thumbnail for play or editing, it becomes an active inset window with full motion and sound, allowing you to preview your selection or edit without going full-screen. Extremely useful.
For faster searching/skipping, you can set the recorder to insert new chapter marks automatically at a selected interval, or you can insert marks manually after recording. You can split or join chapters, delete segments, assign titles to programs, chapters, and discs, and almost anything else you can do with any other DVD recorder. While it's not the kind of frame-accurate editing possible on a computer, it should be flexible enough for most users. On the other hand, to enter disc titles and the like, you have to select characters one by one from an onscreen map — it would be a lot easier if you could hook up a computer keyboard.
BOTTOM LINE The Pioneer DVR-320 and 520H DVD recorders are surprisingly easy to use. The onscreen graphics are big, readable, thoughtfully laid out, and largely self-explanatory. I was able to perform almost every important recording and editing job without having to crack the clear, succinct manuals. The absence of an electronic program guide makes finding programs and scheduling recordings a manual proposition. But these decks do their jobs elegantly, and they're hard to beat for value.